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Home > Language, Linguistics & Creative Writing > Linguistics > The Syntax and Semantics of Focus: Evidence from Dagaare
The Syntax and Semantics of Focus: Evidence from Dagaare

The Syntax and Semantics of Focus: Evidence from Dagaare


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About the Book

This dissertation, "The Syntax and Semantics of Focus: Evidence From Dagaare" by Kazuhiro, Sakurai, 櫻井和裕, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: This thesis examines the conceptions of focus and information structure from syntactic and semantic perspectives using data from Dagaare, a Mabia language spoken in Ghana and neighbouring Burkina Faso (Bodomo 1997b; 2000). While focus is often analysed in terms of its prosodic and discourse features cross-linguistically, this study demonstrates how Dagaare focus particles illustrate the marking of what Lambrecht (1994) terms focus categories, viz. sentence focus, argument focus, and predicate focus. The focus particle la - a positive counterpart to the negative ba - is of particular interest in this study; I show that (i) its presence implies that Dagaare verbs lack inherent polarity, that (ii) it is the only particle which can mark all three of Lambrecht's focus categories, and that (iii) it has a special distribution based on semantic and syntactic concerns. That Dagaare focus particles mark each of these three focus categories is a catalyst for their extended integration into the syntactic and semantic analysis and representation of focus and information structure, using the lexical-functional grammar (LFG) framework (Kaplan and Bresnan 1982; Bresnan 2001; Dalrymple 2001). Within LFG, the notion of focus categories, supported by the Dagaare data, reveal that i-structure (Andreasson 2007; Dalrymple and Nikolaeva 2011) can be expanded to accommodate the inclusion of focus category-specific attributes (viz. SFOCUS, AFOCUS, and PFOCUS) which contain operator and domain features for focus particles. I then use glue semantics (LFG+glue) (Andrews 2010c; Asudeh 2012) to demonstrate the combinatorial principles of focus particles in Dagaare, ultimately showing how the meanings and domains of focus particles in each category can be conceptualised as processes of resource consumption; in addition, LFG+glue - using event semantics - provides a clear account of the lack of inherent verb polarity in Dagaare which necessitates the presence of sentence focus particles such as la. Following integration into LFG and LFG+glue, optimality theoretic (OT-) LFG (Bresnan 1998; Kuhn 2003) analysis provides a syntactic and semantic constraint set which accounts for the distribution of focus particles in Dagaare; in doing so, I also provide an updated conception of the input in OT-LFG, partially based on the idea of a split lexicon (Andrews 2005a), which allows for more adequate underspecification of input structures, including f-structure and i-structure, without losing the ability to rule out ungrammatical candidates. These analyses show that focus and information structure - and the notion of focus categories - can be easily integrated into the LFG framework and the related approaches of LFG+glue and OT-LFG. In doing so, it is hoped that this study will garner further interest in (i) the representation of focus and i-structure, (ii) the combinatorial semantics of focus particles, and (iii) further work on Mabia and other West African languages which contain such focus particles for the purpose of typological and theoretical comparison. DOI: 10.5353/th_b5317015 Subjects: Dagaare language - Sematics Dagaare language - Syntax


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Product Details
  • ISBN-13: 9781361386095
  • Publisher: Open Dissertation Press
  • Publisher Imprint: Open Dissertation Press
  • Height: 279 mm
  • No of Pages: 330
  • Sub Title: Evidence from Dagaare
  • Width: 216 mm
  • ISBN-10: 1361386096
  • Publisher Date: 27 Jan 2017
  • Binding: Paperback
  • Language: English
  • Spine Width: 18 mm
  • Weight: 767 gr


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